Or retooling the overall transportation infrastructure?
Yes, pollution is bad. Diesel trucks are a highly visible form. However, there are too many unknowns for these sweeping statements about 'true' costs to be taken seriously. It is another example of the economic calculation problem.
Try as they might, researchers can't sit in a bureau and come up with figures to plan an economy with.
Only 19% of electricity generated today in the US is from coal, trending toward 0. Then consider larger fossil fuel power plants are far more efficient than the tiny engines in vehicles.
"Coal is used to power electric vehicles," is an argument that is more noise than signal.
This is regional dependent. The last time I looked in Colorado, and electric vehicle is actually spews more pollution when running than a gas car b/c of the amount of coal power plants that we run - much to the chagrine of all the Boulderites in their Teslas.
Colorado is 30% NG and 30% coal, probably because a lot of coal is mined in adjacent Wyoming and MT. The rest are renewables. The coal number keeps dropping, so EV use will improve over time without upgrading the vehicle.
EVs emit less CO2 than diesel trucks even when the electricity is produced using coal power plants. And the best part is that coal is on its way out, rapidly being replaced by gas and renewables, so EVs get even better over time!
I think I'm arguing that we should look at the long tail of power source/generation of both diesel and electric vehicles.
The problem may be that "both aren't perfectly great" and maybe the best solution, despite Capitalism, is to use less as one of the only ways to well: save ourselves from destroying the Planet.
You could ask people how much they’d pay to keep chocolate or coffee, bananas, pineapples, or mangoes. Most of Florida’s coastline, about half of California. There are things that specialists disagree about, but all have no doubt that all those crops will not be cultivated (outside) if we stay the course. Florida and California are now seeing insurance companies bailing out, so we are moving from scientific certainty to economic reality.
Naturally, there’s more: most people think that Cajou nuts, açai berries, passion fruits, agave, prickly pears, should be on this list (because of temperature) but if we start looking at that, then people think pollinator collapse or opportunist infection are going to be there first… So I tried to make a conservative list.
Typically the answer to the question “What would you pay to keep those (chocolate, coffee, etc.)?” is that whatever cost to save those things is worth it. You can try to find numbers, but the US famously started wars to end democracies in several countries to grow just bananas (that gave us “Banana Republic”), so we are closer to amounts where it’s less money measured in many billions and more state-sponsored violence.
All that long rant to say: whatever is the cost of not destroying those, that is the “true” cost.
2. The cost of CO2 extraction and storage
With current rock-bottom electricity prices in Iceland, ClimateWorks research facility can extract CO2 for a bit more than $3,000 per ton (depending on accounting for research costs; that number is just OpEx IIRC).
To convert that to the cost of transporting goods, you can apply a ratio of 50 grams of CO2 per tonne-kilometer [1]. A 40-ton truck will have to pay $600 to compensate for every 100 km.
That sounds like a lot, even without considering the cost of storage.
ClimateWorks hope to lower the price by an order of magnitude [0], which specialists think is unlikely. In truth, much cheaper electricity makes electric trucks that much more appealing. You will never save any money by burning fuel and then spending energy trying to re-capture that CO2 at low concentrations. It’s engineering nonsense. A better idea would be to have trucks carry a balloon with their emissions and that’s obviously a clownish idea. All that, again, before we even have a scalable solution for storage. A cousin works on that project for Statoil. Sure it might work (with the right salt cave) but it’s nowhere ready to scale to handle emissions from trucks all over the world.
So we will never be even close to making ICE trucks a sound idea if we consider the environmental impact.
